Would You Like to Swing on a Star?
by Coriandergirl
Summary: Many of us have imagined what it would be like if we were to wake up one day in the middle of a fairy tale. For Naomi, this isn't just an empty wish...anymore. What would YOU do?


_Hello. Before I start to tell you what happened, I suppose I had better introduce myself. My name is Naomi Pendleton, I'm sixteen years old, and I have lived in America all my life. Before all this crazy stuff started, I was just a typical student. Maybe a little more educationally driven than the average teen, but for the most part, pretty ordinary. I had survived three trans-continental moves, middle school, and one extremely messy divorce while still retaining a fairly upbeat personality. The one thing I loved to do, more than anything else, was read. Fantasy, science fiction, even the occasional bodice-heaver (though those were only in cases of extreme boredom and lack of new reading material), anything fictional appealed to me. It had always been a childhood fantasy of mine to travel into the plot of one my favorites. And then one day, I found myself actually in the middle of a world that could only exist between the pages of a book…_

On that day, I woke up at exactly 5:34, as I have every day since starting high school. Usually, if the morning I had awoken to was a weekday, I would remain in bed, with my eyes closed, listening to the news on my radio alarm clock, savoring the last remnants of peaceful warmth in my cozy cocoon before beginning to maneuver my way off my loft bed. Last summer my mother had finally given in to sense and bought for me both a desk and loft bed to replace the tiny old captains' bed I had slept in since I'd been promoted from the crib and the old school desk we'd salvaged from the dumpster when the middle school had gone through renovations. Already over five feet above the floor, when the bed had both the thin mattress and my old foam futon and all my various pillows, sleeping bags, blankets, stuffed animals, and text books from late night homework rushes, I could not even begin to sit up without hitting my forehead against the ceiling. Normally I would have to draw my legs up and out from under the blankets and whatnot, and slide my body down the bed and diagonally toward the opening at the top of the ladder, until my legs were hanging out in the open air. Once I had gotten my hips over the ledge, it was always a simple procedure of simply reaching down until my toes were properly balanced on the rungs of the ladder and clambering the rest of the way down.

However, on this particular morning, when I regained consciousness at the prompt time of four minutes past the half-hour marker of Five in the morning, it was not to the sound of Chaz and AJ bickering over whether the sky was threatening rain or merely cloudy. At first, I could not discern a single sound beyond that of my own heartbeat, still contentedly sluggish from my night's rest. Soon after, though, I realized I heard what could only be people trying to keep what they were saying secret. How did I know this, you may ask. It was quite a simple conclusion, really, I could distinctly hear rushed, whispering voices, an obvious sign that people had a secret that they were excited or frightened about.

Now, you must understand something. At this point, I still believed myself to be at home, in my own, familiar bed, living a life that still made rational sense. In the world that I should have been in, the only voices that would ever be whispering to each other in such tones in such a close proximity to my bed and at such an hour were those of my two younger brothers, and only if they had done something exceptionally bad. Just as they often played the roles of misbehaving troublemakers, I most often filled the role of bossy, interfering older sister. Because it was only what I was expected to do in my role, I stilled completely, and focused all my energy on hearing what was being discussed only feet away from where I lay.

"…doesn't make any sense. I know that all sorts of impossible things can and often do happen here, but this is ridiculous! That's _my_ bed currently being held hostage! Honestly, why couldn't it be Mathilda's? Then it would at least make sense."

"That's so horrid of you! What did Hilda ever do to you to make you hate her so much?"

"Hey, don't blame just me! In case you hadn't noticed, NO-ONE likes that slob. She's just so…so…_ugh_."

"_I_ happen to like Hilda quite a bit. In fact, I daresay you could call us friends. So why don't you just go and—"

"Girls! Come on, don't do this right now! We need to focus on whoever it is in Hildegard's bed, not these silly factions of yours'. Now, do either of you recognize her? I'm assuming it is a her.."

"I already _told_ you, Pansy! We've never seen her before! We would have never called you up so early in the morning if it had been someone we knew! Why can't you just take care of it? _You're_ the one in charge!"

"Very well, then, I suppose we'd better go and get the prof—"

Jus as the admittedly strange conversation began to almost make sense, it cut off. Now, if you were to wake up one morning to hear a quiet conversation going on nearby that made absolutely no sense in the context of the context of normalcy, and you lived a life such as the one I had recently grown accustomed to, you could only come to one of three conclusions; 1, There were strange people in my house, holding equally strange conversations that for no reason just ended; 2, I was still asleep, and experiencing a very vivid dream; or 3, My brothers were watching TV, and had suddenly shut it off for whatever. Since explanation 1 made zero sense, and explanation 2 didn't work because I _knew_ I was awake, I knew it had to be the third possibility, an altogether not-unusual occurrence in my household. It was as I came to this sensible conclusion and opened my eyes to the day, completely satisfied that everything in my life was completely as it should be, that I realized that I had never been so very wrong before in my life.

Not only were the voices I'd been hearing nowhere remotely related to the comparatively normal land of television, they weren't even coming from the throats of normal people. As my eyes jerked spastically from one alien sight to the next, recognizing nothing in my surroundings, my awareness was overfilled with the deceptively simple fact that this was _not_ my bed, _not_ my room, and, therefore, _not _my life.

No matter in what direction I turned my sight, it was met with only more strange, unfamiliar, _wrongness_. Gone were the welcoming yellow walls, the overcrowded dressers topped with various accessories of life, the posters, poems, and assorted pictures I'd deemed important enough to affix on the vertical surfaces of my bedroom, my safe haven. Gone. In their place was green. Green, Silver, and Stone.


End file.
